Effects and filters should not affect snapshots

[Synetech]

I was just looking through the folder of screenshots that I have taken with VLC over the years to organize them all. To my surprise and dismay, a large number of them are effectively worthless and must be discarded because they are completely washed out.

This is because I usually use the Effects and Filters dialog to turn the gamma up a few notches so that I can see what’s happening in the videos. I cannot just turn up the brightness of the monitor because it is only the videos that tend to be too dark, the rest of the screen is already plenty bright.

It seems that the video effects affect screenshots as well as the live video. This is wrong because if the snapshot is too dark, then people can simply adjust them as necessary with a photo-editor like they would any other picture. Even numerous pictures can be batch-adjusted without effort, but stopping to open the dialog, turn off the filters, take the screenshot, then turn it back on (assuming you remember beforehand and don’t have to rewind, or remember at all) is an unacceptable and unnecessary burden.

The effects should only apply to the live feed, not screenshots; those should be a raw dump of that frame before effects are applied.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Sorry but most users expect the snapshot to have filters applied. In fact, a lot of users are complaining that this does not happen - when transcoding.

[Synetech]

That doesn’t make sense; you can easily modify multiple snapshots in a graphics program to apply filters, but you cannot undo the ones that VLC applies at all.

Like I said, turning off the filters to take a snapshot then back on to continue watching is a lot of work. At least make an Apply to snapshots checkbox so that users don’t have to jump through hoops just to take a snapshot or get surprised to find that all of their snapshots are garbage because they forgot to turn it off. I’ve got snapshots of videos from several years ago that are ruined because of this and I cannot replace because the videos are long gone.

Adding an option would be a simple solution for everybody.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

No, the premise is that you snapshot what you see, not what the original video signal was. While you can easily apply gamma correction in any reasonable picture editor, gamma is not the only nor the most common filter.

Deinterlacing and subtitle blending should definitely be included in the snapshot, as should most more obscure filters in fact.

[Synetech]

Shouldn’t it be up to users to determine their needs and how they use the program?

Adding an Apply-to-snapshots option would be an easy way to cover all scenarios.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

We already have that option. It consists of disabling the filters.

And the UI is intricate to use and maintain enough.

[Synetech]

Like I said, turning the filters off just to take a snapshot is a lot of work. It is completely infeasible to expect users to pause the video, open the dialog, disable the option, take the snapshot, turn the filter back on, and close it just to take a snapshot, and that’s assuming they even remember that it’s on. Expecting users to jump through such hoops is absurd when all it takes is a single checkbox and an additional if statement. Besides, you’ve already added several write to config checkboxes to the filters dialog, so I don’t see how such a useful feature as this would be any more difficult.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

so I don’t see how such a useful feature as this would be any more difficult.

Patches are welcome, then